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Shakespeare knew how to pick a story. Most of his plots are not original—they come from Italian novellas or Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”—but he does incredible things with them. In that sense, modern reinterpretations continue a tradition of which Shakespeare himself was a part. His plays are already adaptations, and they inspire people to make them speak to their own moment.

It’s also interesting that Shakespeare gets quoted by people across the political spectrum. Unlike novels, plays don’t have a single authorial point of view. They present different voices and perspectives, leaving a great deal open to interpretation. Because plays depend so much on performance, every staging becomes a new iteration of the work. Audiences bring their own concerns and experiences to it, so the plays keep being rediscovered in different ways.

Shakespeare didn’t write anything specifically about the death of his only son, Hamnet, at age eleven. Or, if he did, it hasn’t survived. O’Farrell’s novel—and its recent film adaptation—fill in a gap by exploring what this loss was like. That’s very inventive and has inspired some of my creative writing and film students to use Shakespeare as a springboard for their own work.

I think the novel draws out something that’s already inherent in the play, which is this business of grief and mourning. “Hamlet” is very much about how we deal with mortality and the dead living among us in vivid ways. Hamlet doesn’t really get to grieve properly for his father. He’s told to stop mourning by Claudius and his mother, and that unresolved grief drives the play.

What “Hamnet” does is creatively extrapolate those ideas around Shakespeare’s life. It contains a beautiful piece of writing about how the plague was carried from a foreign shore back to England by a monkey, which students find fascinating. They’re also interested in notions of witchcraft present in the book. But interestingly, they still tend to prefer the play, which I’m pleased about.

In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Titania describes how the natural world and the seasons have suddenly fallen out of order, with contagious fogs, floods and failing crops. When we hear those lines today, it’s hard not to think about climate change. It feels prescient now, almost uncanny. But I’m not suggesting you can draw a simple analogy between Shakespeare’s texts and the modern world. As readers, we bring our own concerns to the plays. It’s not a passive engagement.

Notions of gender in Shakespeare’s time derived not only from the Bible but—through the rise of humanism and the Renaissance turn to classical culture—from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” where characters frequently switch from one sex to another. Many of Shakespeare’s stories and those of other literary writers of that time dealt with some form of gender transformation. We see this clearly in “Twelfth Night,” where Viola dons male attire. Shakespeare is also playing with the reality that in early modern theater, women weren’t allowed on the stage, so female roles were performed by boys. In a way, an early modern trans culture was already built into the theater—suggesting that ideas about gender were more fluid than we might imagine. That started to be increasingly relevant to our own debates about gender identity. Just recently, the great British actor Sir Ian McKellen introduced a trans and non-binary production of “Twelfth Night” in London.

Race is not only important in “Othello” or “Titus Andronicus,” where racial difference is central to the story. Shakespeare’s language often relies on color imagery. In the sonnets, for example, the young male beloved is repeatedly described as “fair,” while the woman in the later poems is described as “black” or “colored ill.” Those terms don’t necessarily mean race in the way we understand it today. They could refer to complexion, hair color or moral qualities, but they do create a kind of color coding. Race was not irrelevant to early modern people either. There were Black people living in Britain, so it’s not just a metaphor, but ideas of race were rather different.

In recent years, there’s been fascinating work by critics who have been motivated by their own concerns about race—books like Arthur Little’s “White People in Shakespeare” or Farah Karim-Cooper’s “The Great White Bard.” What’s interesting about these studies is that they show how Shakespeare can open up conversations about race that are not acrimonious, dogmatic, or ideologically inflected. The plays allow us to raise questions we might find too difficult to talk about elsewhere.

We’re all incredibly different and need some common cultural ground. You can see that historically as well. During the American Civil War, people turned to Shakespeare—especially “Hamlet” and “Julius Caesar”—to process the tragedy that was happening around them. I think it’s wonderful when everybody is focused on a particular cultural moment, the way we are right now with “Hamnet.”

I’m surprised every time I see a performance. I recently saw a production of “Othello” in London that staged Desdemona’s death quite differently—it made the familiar shocking again. And then there’s the language itself. I find the beauty of Shakespeare’s poetry increasingly moving the older I get.

Story by Olivia Hall